Twitter / jeremyweate

Monday, June 18, 2007

There's an unusual and interesting sounding (literally) event coming up on the 20th and 21st - turning the Sahelian landscape into art and sound - at a gallery near London Bridge. Click here for more. Download the pdf flyer at the bottom of the page for a more detailed take on the show.

Pasted below is some text from the flyer, if you can't be bothered to download it:

Landscapes reflect the livesand histories of the people wholive in them. Scientific analysisof the soil can be used toexamine how people lived inthe past and provide lessons forfuture management of landscapesin extreme or fragileenvironments.

The Sahel in Africa is an area at the fringe of the Sahara desert.It is one of the world’s most marginal environments yet is hometo over 50 million people. With a dry season lasting eightmonths of the year and unreliable rainfall, survival is hard forfarming communities. Climate change is keenly felt in theSahel. Understanding how people managed this landscapeduring past periods of climate change is essential in developingsuccessful responses to future changes.

Soils can store informationrecording the way peoplehave affected the land overthousands of years. Microscopicfragments of differentobjects found in the soil cantell us about past landscapes.The colour, size and number offragments offer further cluesabout the management oflandscapes.

New means of understanding past landscapes - The latestadvances in visual and sonic technologies allow us to illuminateand make audible these ancient landscapes. In this uniqueinstallation, a computer explores and represents nearly 10,000years of soil records, revealing them in different colours andperspectives. Sounds of the Sahel, and sounds made afresh arerecalled and shaped by the computer using scientific informationtaken from the soil itself.